In the novels of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac or yet again Flaubert, titles of novels and names of novelists – some well known, others now forgotten – make their appearance and allow for the reconstruction of a singular genealogy whose inheritance is more or less admitted to. In other words, the realist novel could be seen as writing for itself a history of the novel capable of compensating for the difficulties a then nascent literary criticism was encountering in so doing. And this history would necessarily be written firm the point of view of the victors these novelists were intent on becoming, even if to that end they might end up contradicting the theoretical models they were advancing elsewhere, so that the shape they ended up giving their strategy of self-legitimation is more contradictory than what literary history has remembered of it.